I suspect I’m not alone in having been through break-ups that took place entirely on Facebook. It’s probably only a matter of time till I’m dumped via Twitter (“@tommeltzer It’s over #itsnotyouitsme #itisyoureally”).

On August 1, almost the entire Earth-facing side of the sun erupted in a tumult of activity. There was a C3-class solar flare, a solar tsunami, multiple filaments of magnetism lifting off the stellar surface, large-scale shaking of the solar corona, radio bursts, a coronal mass ejection and more. This extreme ultraviolet snapshot from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows the sun's northern hemisphere in mid-eruption. Different colors in the image represent different gas temperatures.

Endgame in Afghanistan: 'It's taken a year to move 20km'
As the war in Afghanistan enters its final chapter, Sean Smith's brutal, uncompromising film from the Helmand frontline shows the horrific chaos of a stalemate that is taking its toll in blood.

It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetimeyou will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books- Already the branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Twig is an object persistence interface built on Google App Engine's low-level datastore which overcomes many of JDO-GAEs limitations including full support for inheritance, polymorphism and generic types. You can easily configure, modify or extend Twigs behaviour by implementing your own strategies or overriding extension points in pure Java code.

I remember hearing on radio or the teevee many years ago that linguistic geographical ground zero of the US – the place, that is, where the accent is closest to "standard" American – is right around Steubenville. Ohio.